14. Would I Do It Again?

I suppose that every performer in every realm of professional sports is asked the same question, namely: "If you knew what you know today, would you do it all over again?" There is also the variation of that ques­tion: "If you had a son who wanted to be a professional football player, would you let him do it, or wring his neck?"

I cannot answer for tennis players, baseball players, pugilists, or chess wizards, or even for other football players. Only for myself. Unhesitat­ingly, I would say "Yes" to the first question, and "I don't know" to the second because I have three daughters instead of a son.

Let's start from the beginning, or what I consider the beginning. When I was a youngster playing high school football, I never gave a thought to football as a career. As I mentioned in the first chapter, pro football players at that time were held in low repute on the West Coast, probably because there weren't any National Football League teams west of Chicago. Actually, I didn't even have any intention of going on to college and playing football after I graduated from high school and joined the Navy.

In the Navy, I was just another swabbie with a mop, a bucket, and a pair of dungarees. But, it was then that I began noticing things that shaped my whole future life. While we swabbies slept in three-high bunks, washed our own clothes, and ate food that must have been cooked by a guy who was a grave digger in civilian life, the officers had their own individual quarters, ate special food, got deferential salutes, and could change from wet clothes to a dry martini with impunity.

The only apparent qualification of many of these officers, or so it seemed to a mind that was still maturing, was that they had a college education and I didn't. I said to myself that if a caste system in the Navy was predicated on a college degree, there must be quite a lot of the same in civilian life. So after I had spent three years swabbing the deck—and also the head—I had firmly decided to get into college by hook or crook. Fortunately for a young man short on money Uncle Sam had provided help in the form of the GI Bill. I used it to enter the University of Oregon.

But,  even after I  began  playing football  at Oregon,  I still was  not intrigued by the professional side of the game. In my second year, how­ever, we won seven and lost three, and professional scouts began noticing me and writing me letters. The mention of money in these letters intrigued me because I still didn't have any money.

When I finished college in three years by working at my books straight through the summers, I could have coached football and taught physical education or biological sciences at a number of high schools in the North­west at a salary of around $4,000 a year to start.

I have no prejudice against teaching; in fact, I like to teach. But, I did have a prejudice against the salary when viewed in the light of the fact I had married and the professional Los Angeles Rams were willing to start me off as a rookie quarterback at double the salary I would have gotten as a teacher.   Besides, I liked to play football.

In the ensuing years, my football salary increased to the point where I was on a level with well-established doctors and lawyers. And compared to most doctors and lawyers in that salary bracket, I was still a very young man.

During that period, I met people whom I never would have met had I been a teacher of biological sciences in some high school. When I was doing some selling during the off-season, offices were open to me that would never would have been open to me if I had not been a well-known athlete. You say that isn't quite cricket. It isn't, but it's a fact of life that has to be faced up to and taken advantage of. Even if the purchasing agent could purchase nothing from me, he would sit down, talk football and other sports with me, and usually tell me about another purchasing agent who could purchase something from me.

Also, there were any number of lucrative sidelines open to me such as personal appearances for firms anxious to promote their products, speech making, and endorsing a wide range of merchandise.

But, even if the player is a first-year man who still has to make his mark, he usually starts off better fixed financially than the nonathlete who graduates with him. The average starting salary in the National Football League is now around $8,000, plus a bonus, usually $1,000. I do not have to tell you what stars like Billy Cannon sign for, because it has all been in the papers, and I would be going out of my way to promote a rival organization.

Just contrast that $9,000 kickoff for a football professional with what the nonathletic C student gets along with his sheepskin. I would say that most of them are lucky if they get a $5,000 job, and they have to work 50 weeks of the year to get it. Our season is five months long, one game a week for a total of six exhibition games and 12 scheduled contests. During the regular season, practice lasts about three hours, four days a week, and we have the other 21 hours to sell shoelaces, or improve our minds by watching shoot-em-ups on television.

But, you may say, if you put the energy you put into football into a brainier pursuit, you would match the pro player's starting salary, and maybe then some.

Also, you add, a professional athlete's career span is limited. When he does have to give up professional athletics, he has "wasted" so many valuable years of his life, that he often is not qualified to hoe tomatoes or run a filling station.

On the first point, I will admit that if a graduate engineer, say, is near the top of his class, he is in a position to demand, and get, the equivalent of a football player's starting salary. But, I think, in many cases those "brain" salaries are exaggerated. I know, for instance, of a fellow graduate who for ten years has been the head of a department in an electronics plant and his salary even now is no more than $8,500.

I will agree to the second point, but with strong reservations. Unlike a baseball player who is engrossed in his athletic livelihood eight months of the year and almost every day of the week, a football player has ample time and opportunity to erect a strong sideline fence. Or, as the late, beloved commissioner Bert Bell said, "a football player who does not make football a means to an end, is dumber than the tackling dummy." And from personal observation, I don't think most football players are that dumb.

During his playing career, the pro should bend his spare energies toward making contacts and finding the line of work he thinks he would like to undertake when his playing days are over. He should likewise make sure that his income does not fall off a steep plateau when he gives up football entirely. It is this sudden drop that causes most players to stall off their retirement until they are just about creaking at the joints.

The smart ones will realize that their salary in a non-athletic full-time endeavor cannot equal, at the start, what they made when they were playing football and selling shoelaces on the side. The dumb ones will want to start at the top, or in other words, to go out of football without the semblance of a financial pinch.

I was thinking about this one bright, sunny day while I was taking my pre-season physical examination. The examiner was Dr. Michael Mandarino, team physician for the Eagles. Right before me was a classic example of a professional football player who made the game a means to an end.

Dr. Mandarino played football at LaSalle College in Philadelphia and then joined the professional Eagles. The money he earned as a pro was used to put him through Hahnemann Medical College. He is now one of the finest bone surgeons in the country and the inventor of a method of healing fractured bones quickly. What was he doing examining the Eagles?   It's his hobby, a labor of love.

As I write this, there are several current pro football stars on their way to a medical career. Bill McColl of the Bears is finishing up his studies at the University of Chicago, and Dave Middleton of the Lions is interning at a hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Dentists don't do very badly either, and there are scores of them around who got their start by knocking out the other guy's teeth on a pro football field. To name a few, there are Dan Garza, former New York Yank who was a teammate of mine at Oregon; Les Horvath, a Los Angeles dentist who served with the Rams and the Browns; the Osmanski brothers of the Bears, Bill and Joe, now dentists in Chicago.

Departing from the field of body repairs, there is Sid Luckman, the famed quarterback of Columbia University and the Bears, who is reputed to be making a fortune in the vending business. Glenn Davis, a former Cadet and a former Ram, is director of special events for the Los Angeles Times. Curly Morrison, of the Bears and the Browns, is an executive of Sports Illustrated; and Hal Dean, Rams, is an oil geologist for the Pauley Oil Company.

To continue, Jack Banta, Eagles, is a West Coast insurance tycoon; Al Wistert, also of the Eagles, is head of one of the largest insurance agencies in Detroit. Otto Graham, Browns, is head football coach, athletic director, and a Commander at the Coast Guard Academy; and Jack Sanders, former one-armed guard with the Eagles, now directs five companies in Texas.

There are hundreds of others I could cite. But I don't have to depend on the past to buttress my argument that pro football is an entree to lucrative living. How about such modern players as Johnny Unitas, owner of three bowling alleys in Baltimore, and so well fixed in stock holdings that he'll probably come out of this league a millionaire. Or the Colts' Gino Marchetti, owner of a string of hamburger hutches; Alan Ameche, proprietor of three restaurants; and Tommy McDonald, at the tender age of 25, is a director of an Oklahoma bank and also gets a handsome sum from a Southwest bowling alley just for the use of his name.

On the matrimonial side, the players don't do badly either. To name a few: Ron Waller, an ex-Ram, is married to the grand-daughter of the cereal fortune matriarch, Marjorie Merryweather Post. Ron Miller, after a year with the Rams, took Walt Disney's daughter as his bride and moved into Disneyland. Bud McFadden is the husband of a young lady whose father owns half of West Texas. Bud now runs a dude ranch near Houston. Leon Clark, the Rams' tall end, wed the heiress to the Beech­nut chewing gum, baby food, and allied products millions.

If a football player does not care to make his fortune in steel, insurance, oil, dude ranches, or romance, he can always become a coach.   A fortune, though, isn't guaranteed. But he'll do all right at the going rate for pro head coaches of $25,000 a year, or an assistant's stipend of $10,000 to $13,000. And if he sets his sights lower, there are always the colleges and the high schools.

More and more, the pros are dipping into their own ranks for coaching talent. When the Rams let Sid Gillman, a former college coach go, they replaced him with Bob Waterfield, their old quarterback, and hired Elroy Hirsch away from the movies and other interests to become general manager.

At present, 25 former Eagles are coaching in the colleges, while seven others are coaching the professionals either in Canada or the United States. The new American Football League staffs are manned almost entirely by former N.F.L. coaches or players.

And while I am singing about the sweet bird of success, I cannot help but inject a sour note—my desire to hang, draw, and quarter those mis­guided people who still regard a football player, college or pro, as some­thing that drops out of a tree with the I.Q. of a three-toed sloth. Those with low I.Q.'s have no chance to survive in pro football. The dullard who has to have signals taped on his wrist soon finds himself digging sewers for a livelihood. This applies to the linemen, too, those fellows who are supposed to be big, brutal, and dumb. Ours is an extremely complicated game, and the back who runs right when he is supposed to run left soon finds himself running straight ahead for the exit.

Let me make a point. When I entered college I was not a great student, although I have known many football players who were good students, and some who were even exceptional. But, during my three years at college, I rubbed elbows and brains with some very intelligent people. I couldn't help having something worthwhile rub off on me. I also learned good work habits. In the long run, after acquiring these work habits, I came out of college with a lot more than some lad who got a free financial ride from his old man.

Most students, football players or butterfly collectors, are C, or average, students according to college statistics. A C-student like myself had to work harder to get those C's than a natural "brain" who hardly ever had to crack a book to roll up his A's. I think that in learning how to work harder, I gained a distinct advantage over the fellow who didn't have to learn how to work hard.

In order to attain good or even passing marks, a football player has a couple of major handicaps to overcome. Remember, please, that for two-thirds of the year, he gives up his afternoons, toiling like a coolie while the nonathletes are lapping up refreshments in the Campus Corner and cutting capers with the girls. Often after a hard practice or a game, I would hit the books, weary in mind and muscle.   At 11 p.m., I'd find myself falling asleep over a chapter in medieval English literature, utterly exhausted.

Some of the instructors pose another major handicap for the player-student. They give you that look which seems to say, "O.K., big shot, you're the campus hero now. Hang around a while until I take apart what few brains you were endowed with."

Colleges all over the country are tightening up on their requirements. I know of one college, once noted as a rest home for gridders with low I.Q.s, that just a year or so ago flunked out half the freshman football team. The next season this college, once famed as a football power, lost all but one out of 10 games.

There are, of course, still some football foundries around. But even they can do only so much for a numbskull. I know of one university that took in a tremendous high school tackle who got his diploma only because the teachers were tired of trying to pound knowledge into his head with a mallet. The university tried to help the lad out by giving him special instruction equivalent to sixth-grade grammar school English. The pigskin Einstein even booted that. There was nothing else to do but boot him out of college.

I'll concede, though, that some football players, particularly among the pros, can be dumb in another way that has nothing to do with marks. They sit around listening to clubhouse lawyers and the wives of disgruntled players. Usually, second-string players. These two pests—clubhouse law­yers and gossiping wives—can do more to injure the morale of a team than three straight defeats.

The clubhouse lawyer, without whom no team is complete, is the guy who knows more about football and the team itself than the coaches, owners, and officials combined. If not taken in hand, this pest can ruin the spirit and morale of the most eager rookie. By taking in hand I mean giving him a dressing-down. And if that fails, trading him to another team, or putting him on waivers, even if he is one of your most talented performers.

In business, they say that you should keep no secret from your wife; that the little woman should be a hand-in-hand partner as you struggle toward your first million.

In football, I can't see it working that way unless the little woman happens to be one who is grown up mentally and emotionally and can also keep a sharp check on her tongue. Unless she is, the best thing that a football player with problems can do is to take them to a psychologist, or a father confessor.

But, no. Too many players take their problems home and air them. Then, the girls hold a kaffee-klatch some fine afternoon, and the air is filled with  such remarks as,  "Why  doesn't  that  stupid coach  play my husband regularly? My husband has more talent in his little finger than that other dumb ox has in his whole body. If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to make husband march right into the general manager and demand that he get a $5,000 raise."

Like poison gas, this sort of gossipy guff can't help but pollute the atmosphere, both at home and abroad. Each wife gives her husband an earful of what the other wife says, and soon the locker room is infested with cliques of disgruntled players.

What I'm trying to get at is this—the worst thing a player can do is listen to another player who isn't playing regularly, or to his wife. Listen to his or her groans, I mean. And he should have enough control over his own little woman to make sure that she doesn't sit around and listen to the wife of a disgruntled player.

My advice in this situation is to listen only to the coaches and your conscience. The coaches may not be mental giants, but I think that in the main they have your welfare at heart. Their livelihood depends on winning, which means fielding their best players without regard to a player's race, color, creed, or the cut of his jib.

As for listening to your own conscience, I think that's even better than listening to the coaches. It means rating yourself, your abilities and capabilities. It means being honest with yourself. It means refusing to brag and refusing to gripe. It means refusing to be a clubhouse lawyer or a sounding board for gossipy wives and disgruntled players. Or to paraphrase Shakespeare, "This above all, to thine own self be true."

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